words by Ellie johnson | photo by Leonardo Cendamo

Despite its brevity, Ti Amo (2020) by Hanne Ørstavik is a work that finds a thousand different ways to say ‘I love you’. In Ti Amo, love is not limited to the phrase alone: the infamous saying “actions speak louder than words” has never rang more true. When reality becomes too overwhelming, “Ti Amo” – “I love you” – morphes into the perfect buffer. Whether manifested in acts of service, understanding and respect or words that are simply spoken, love becomes the only thing safe and stable in Hanne Ørstavik’s novel. Her protagonist takes the reader on a heartbreaking journey that explores love and loss in equal measures. There is no question that Ørstavik’s writing has an unexpected quality — it's sudden, abrupt and it leaves the reader trying to catch their breath from the very first page. 

Ti Amo unfolds through the perspective of an unnamed Norwegian writer whose husband has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Constantly switching between the past and present day, the narrator invites the reader into a world that always feels on the brink of death — an unavoidable death that no amount of love can prevent. The present day depicts the protagonist taking care of her husband in their relatively new apartment in Milan: what was supposed to be a life filled with long summer evenings featuring good food, people and travel transitions into hospital visits, poor health and days of not being able to move further than the front door. Unfortunately, the narrator’s memories and flashbacks of the past are no different, as they are also tainted with illness. Remembering the months leading up to her husband’s diagnosis, the narrator recounts sleepless nights and occasions where walks out were too painful to continue. Their relationship before this illness, what it looked like and how it felt before it became so troubled, is never revealed to the reader. Instead, what is shown is that wherever there’s love shared between two people, there is also death. 

Ørstavik’s coupling of love and death begs the question ‘which partner suffers the most?’ Yes, the husband is the more obvious, black-and-white answer. He is dying; severely suffering from both physical and emotional pain, he is inevitably leaving the ones he loves behind. Yet, his terminal case entails an awareness that – at some point – the suffering will stop. Can the reader say the same about the narrator, his wife? As Ti Amo is narrated from her perspective, it becomes apparent that there is always a secondary victim to terminal illness: the loved one, the helpless bystander waiting for the worst to happen. Although her suffering can never be measured against her husband’s, it is hers that becomes the focus of Hanne Ørstavik’s novel. 

At the heart of the narrator’s suffering is her husband’s inability to talk of his terminal diagnosis. Death appears to be always present in their lives, but never in conversation.  Throughout Ti Amo, denial protects this man from the painful reality of his own impending death. Although his response is an incredibly human one, denial does not protect the narrator, his wife, in the same way. In fact, the narrator’s loneliness is intensified as a result of her husband’s denial. She often remains silent, even when he insists that their lives must resume as normal, because she is too afraid to break the facade that he is so desperately trying to maintain. The narrator lets her husband live in this world of denial because she loves him; she does not want to destroy one of the only things he is still in control of. 

Control, or a lack thereof, is a theme that is heavily drawn upon in Ti Amo and one that is inseparable from dying. Ørstavik’s narrator witnesses the man she loves gradually lose control over all aspects of his life whilst knowing there is nothing that can be said or done to make him feel any less vulnerable. Despite his attempts to control the situation on an emotional level and not discuss his terminal illness, the narrator’s husband has nowhere to hide when the cancer becomes too much for his physical body. The narrator’s depiction of her husband’s physical suffering feels devastatingly real from a reader’s point of view — raw, vivid and cuts close to the bone. She describes a man who can’t help but whimper from such extremes of pain, she talks of “everything they’d cut away and sewn up” in surgery and the problematic bowel issues that followed; she resolves that even the living can share the appearance of those that are already dead. What’s most hard-hitting is when Ørstavik takes these moments and removes them from the context of a hospital or doctor’s office, positioning them instead in the context of the home. When their home, a space that should mean love, comfort and safety, is overpowered by pain and suffering, it becomes clear that all control has been relinquished to this illness. 

Yet in spite of their pain and suffering and their inability to find the right words or control their own lives, love prevails. Ørstavik’s narrator illustrates that this couple’s love for each other is of the greatest importance, and above all else, it’s what helps them continue through the darkest of times. This is epitomised the most in the way they greet each other and in the way that they say goodbye. Towards the end of Ti Amo the narrator departs on a writing trip to Mexico, but before she does, she is already thinking about the moment she will be reunited with her husband. There is a heartening moment where she describes a plan she has come up with so she can race through the airport to meet him the second she lands — or as Ørstavik’s narrator frames it, “and finally be home, home, home with you”. This expression of love is only one of many in Ørstavik’s Ti Amo and it is these moments that keep you reading through the painful ones. 

For the readers that enjoy a love story, Ørstavik’s Ti Amo is certainly not a conventional one. Instead, it is one that challenges a reader to look at love from a different perspective: taking the meaning of ‘till death do us part’ quite literally. Love and suffering are explored in such few pages, yet in so much depth. In the end, the reader is left feeling the pain of this couple and is forced to acknowledge that this is likely the ending of far too many love stories…